In the field of large scale, or restaurant scale, processing of food, slicing meat into strips or cubes for use in, for example, fajitas or salads, is a frequent occurrence. Slicing into strips or cubing meat by hand can be a laborious and slow process, and uniformity of the strips or cubes depends upon the skill of the person doing the slicing.
There are, in the prior art, numerous examples of apparatus for slicing meat into strips. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,786,536 of Deckerr, there is shown one such apparatus that simultaneously tenderizes and slices a slab of meat into strips. A plurality of spaced tenderizing blades are mounted on a first shaft and a lesser plurality of spaced slicing blades are mounted on a second shaft closely adjacent and parallel to the first shaft. The slicing blades, which are fewer in number than the tenderizing blades are interleaved therewith. The two shafts are geared together so that the slicing blades revolve faster than the tenderizing blades, and the tenderizing blades penetrate the meat and pull it into the cutting area. Guide fingers are disposed between the tenderizing blades and the slicing blades for guiding the meat into the cutting area. This general arrangement of elements is common to a number of prior art meat tenderizing devices, such as is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,672,716 of Dickey, which also includes stripper plates for preventing the meat from wrapping around the rollers. Such wrapping of the meat around the rollers occurs frequently when raw meat is being tenderized or cut. The raw meat being processed becomes a flexible, glutinous mass with a tendency to stick to the blades and to wrap around the shafts after it is cut, which jams up the cutting area, thereby preventing further cutting until the jam is cleared. Thus, the stripper plates of the Dickey patent are useful in preventing such jam-ups from occurring.
In U.S. Pat. No. 2,163,123 of Huse, there is shown a meat tenderizing machine having the general structure of parallel shafts having interleaved cutters geared together to rotate contra to each other to draw the meat into the cutting area. Spring loaded fingers interspersed between the blades function to guide the meat into the cutting area and to prevent the meat from wrapping around the shafts. Inasmuch as the Huse arrangement does not cut the meat into strips, there is less tendency for the slab of meat to wrap, although such wrapping can occur in the Huse mechanism if the guide fingers are not present and functioning.
As discussed in the foregoing, most of the prior art devices are directed to meat tenderizing, i.e., scoring the meat, and not to meat slicing. Even the Deckerr arrangement, which does slice the meat, simultaneously scores the meat into the cutting area as the tenderizing blades pull the meat therethrough. In all such cases, the apparatus is designed to process raw meat and none of the prior art references of which applicant is aware is designed to process and slice cooked meat into strips or cubes.
In restaurants which serve, for example, fajitas, or diced meat salads, it is much more efficient and economical to cook the meat before slicing or cubing it. Cooked meat loses most of the glutinous tendencies of raw meat and thus is less likely to cling to the cutting blades or to wrap around the shafts. On the other hand, cooked meat is more susceptible to tearing or ragged cutting. Thus, in an apparatus of the type shown in the Deckerr patent, the toothed tenderizing wheels, if used with cooked meat, would tend to tear the meat, resulting in unsightly strips or cubes. Even arrangements such as in the Huse apparatus, which apparently does not use toothed tenderizing wheels to tenderize the meat, tend to make ragged shallow cuts in the meat.
It is therefore, an object of the present invention to cut food, such as meat, into neat, clean-cut strips or cubes, whether the food is raw or cooked.